The Cowbell at the Two Mile Mark

I want to say this about small towns, since people like to say the other thing about them. Yes, everybody knows your business.

But the women who know your business best are the ones who know when not to ask about it.

The boys ran first. Our seven went out in a wave of two hundred and some, all elbows and blue singlets, and the moms screamed until their voices cracked.

Britt’s boy ran a personal best. Our team finished ninth, the best our little school had ever done.

Then it was time for the girls. The moms took me by the elbow and walked me across the park to the two-mile mark, along the back side of the course where the little hill was.

The hill was not much, maybe twenty feet of rise, but it came right after a long flat stretch along the river.

There was a man with an orange flag and a stopwatch standing at the top of the hill calling out times. Two miles.

The rope line ran right along the course there, and the runners would come over the top of the hill and down past us, close enough to touch.

At twenty minutes to ten my phone buzzed in my coat pocket.

It was a picture from Kurt. His boat, the green one he had bought used three summers ago, sitting at a ramp on a lake in Missouri in the early light, and a cooler in the back. Under it he had typed four words. Tell her good luck.

I looked at that picture for a long time. Then I put the phone back in my pocket and zipped the pocket shut.

I did not show it to Ainsley. I never have. Maybe that was wrong of me, and maybe someday I will tell her.

But that morning, at that meet, she did not need to see her father’s boat. She needed to run.

The girls’ race went off at eleven. We heard the gun from way across the park, a flat little crack, and then a sound like wind as a hundred and some girls went out in one long line across the grass.

I could not find her. I stood on my toes and looked, and all I could see was a wall of color, every school’s singlet, all those ponytails, everybody running together in a pack the size of a football field.

The moms around me were calling names. I stood there with the cowbell in my hands and said a little prayer, the kind you say without words, and stamped my feet to keep the blood moving.

The leaders came through the mile on the far side of the park. We could see them going by small and far off, and then the pack behind them stretched out like a rope pulled tight.

I could hear the river and a crow somewhere and my own breathing. My hands were cold on the brass of the bell.

“They’ll come over that hill in about five minutes,” Britt said. “The first ones.”

They came over that hill in four. The first five girls came together, tall girls from the big Sioux Falls schools, running easy like it cost them nothing. The crowd along the rope went up in a roar.

Then ten more. Then a long ragged string of them, and then a bunch together, ten or fifteen, elbows and ponytails and breath smoking in the cold.

I looked for the blue. Royal blue. There were other blue singlets, darker ones and lighter ones, and every time I saw blue my heart jumped and it was not her.